This paper explores the practical application of life cycle assessment (LCA) to product system development. While life cycle assessment methods have been studied and demonstrated extensively over the last two decades, their application to product design and development has not been critically addressed. Many organizational and operational factors limit the integration of the three LCA component...

Sustainability of a bioenergy project depends on precise assessment of biomass resource, planning of cost-effective logistics and evaluation of possible environmental implications. In this context, this paper reviews the role and applications of geo-spatial tool such as Geographical Information System (GIS) for precise agro-residue resource assessment, biomass logistic and power plant design. F...

Integrated Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management is a tedious task requiring the simultaneous fulfilment of technical, economical and social constraints. It combines a range of collection and treatment methods to handle all materials in the waste stream in an environmentally effective, economically affordable and socially acceptable way (McDougall, 2001). Due to the complexity of the issues re...

In order to analyse the impacts of production and consumption on social sustainability, Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) has emerged as an extensive and promising, yet still young methodology. S-LCA captures the whole life cycle of a product and aims to include all relevant affected stakeholders. It therefore requires large amounts of data and produces likewise complex results, which makes ...

Green chemistry not only emphasizes the central production process of the “green” chemical, but it ultimately requires a life-cycle conceptual approach for each chemical product. A life-cycle conceptual approach comprises the consideration of all stages along the life cycle of a chemical (i.e., raw material extraction, pre-production, production, use, recycling, and disposal) as well as the con...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the standardised and globally recognised tool for quantifying environmental impact of goods and services. A key aspect in LCA is the consideration of whole life cycle systems. The application of LCA in product development inherently comprises the quest for optimisations on all system levels. However, as the act of ecodesign conventionally focuses on physical produ...

Significant progress has been made in research on environmental life-cycle assessment (LCA) of pavements. Use of this new knowledge has been slowed by a lack of standardized datasets and analysis protocols. Several software packages have been developed to address this by providing datasets with broader coverage and better quality, but practitioners need applicationspecific data input interfaces...

This paper presents a methodology to integrate life cycle assessment (LCA)in thermoeconomic models used for the optimal conceptual design of energy conversion systems. It is illustrated by an application to a thermo-economic model developed for the multi-objective optimization of combined synthetic natural gas (SNG) and electricity production from lignocellulosic biomass. The life cycle invento...